Here’s what’s new:

• Four player splitscreen!
• The turtles now have tails, like in the original TMNT comics.
• Added cel-shading to many 3D models (code from ZEQ2-lite)
• Remade many images at higher resolution (most or all UI/HUD graphics are “HD”)
• TrueType fonts are used by default and are rendered to screen size (always look nice).
• Redesigned main HUD area.
• Added joystick select menu.
• Created new texture for Overload base.
• Possible to play while hosting an internet server using the game client.
• Team name is now colorized in team play messages.
• Now uses dpmaster protocol, instead of quake3 master protocol, keeps the game separate on master server.
• Automatically choose next map in multiplayer using scripts/arenas.txt (and scripts/*.arena), allows new maps to be automatically be added to map rotation.
• Lots of fixes from ioquake3 contributers, updated from ioq3 revision 1794 to 2236.
• …and many other bug fixes and improvement!

You can download Z Turtle Arena for Windows or Linux. Order some pizza while you do so.

The first beta standalone release of Reaction, an ioquake3-based Action Quake 2-styled game is now available.

Previously, Reaction required a full install of Quake 3: Arena to play.

If you’ve never played Action Quake 2, you should know that it was in the style of your favorite realistic action movies. Guns akimbo, headshots, ridiculous trick jumps, and more await you.

You can check it out here.

(This is not an April fools joke)

If you haven’t heard of q3osc this will make for some great reading, after the break

Ok First off, why dont you tell everyone a little bit about yourself?

Sure, My name’s Rob Hamilton, I’m a composer and developer working mostly in the realms of interactive computer music. I spend my time building computer-based musical systems and then trying to understand how to best write music for these systems. I’m currently working towards my Ph.D at Stanford University in CA, at the CCRMA, which stands for the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, a center for computer music and audio research.

If you had to describe qsosc in as few words as possible to someone who knew nothing about development, what would you say?

q3osc takes the gaming world of ioquake3, with all the motions and gestures which gamers are used to making – like jumping or shooting a plasma ball – and outputs the information from each of those motions and gestures to a program which controls sound and music. This turns any motion a gamer makes, whether he or she is running across a map, jumping or crouching or shooting – into a way to control an instrument.
And with the built-in networking capabilities of ioquake3, gamers or musicians from around the world, or just around the room can all make music together.

We just did a performance last night here at CCRMA with 5 laptop players, a projector and 5 hemispherical speakers (6 speakers in a small dome) where players shooting around the map would shoot sound around the concert hall. It was great!

So how did you get interested in using a video game to generate music?

Well, I have a long life history of loving fps shooters, starting back with Doom and Duke Nukem as a teenager. About 5 or 6 years ago, I was studying music and computer systems at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, and I heard about a project called q3apd, by multi-media artists Julien Oliver and Stephen Pickles. q3apd was a mod of the quake 3 code, I don’t think it was ioquake3 based at the time, that output user positional data using a very basic protocol called FUDI, developed by Miller Puckette for his fantastic Pure Data open-source audio processing language (PD) I didn’t have a chance to try it out until 2 years ago, when I made an 8 channel work for q3apd and interactive performers, where each performer would control aspects of the composition by running around a map I made.

What led you to choose the ioquake3 project as a starting base for q3osc?

After playing with Julien’s code, I wanted a fresh start, especially one that improved on the basic open source packages that ID had given us. I found ioquake3 and the great work you guys had been doing and it seemed like the logical starting place. For my work, it’s great having the flexibility of the quake3 engine with the great add-on features and optimizing that’s been going on in ioquake3 for all this time.
Also the knowledge that there’s a community working towards keeping this excellent code-base up and running and viable makes it worth investing time into projects using it. I’m a big fan!

How did you find working with Ioquake3 (ioq3)

So far, I’ve been having a blast. It’s a large code base, that’s for sure, so the learning curve was a bit steep, but I’ve gotten used to it. By looking through the code, I’ve been finding great new ideas that I’ll hopefully be able to explore in my continued development of q3osc.

What would you like to see in the future from ioq3?

I think that in the future for any game engine like ioquake3 that wants to stay viable and useful for its community, an emphasis on keeping the code up-to-date in a graphic, audio and network sense are extremely important. ioquake3′s adoption of ogg vorbis, and its advances towards 32-bit graphics I think are a great step in the right direction. Keeping an old engine like this looking and feeling new and current are the best suggestions I could make.

In a sense, I think you end up competing with newer large networked platforms like Second Life, especially for less game-oriented projects like my own.with the move towards these large networked software environments, essentially FPS without the S, like Second Life, you start to see a strange mixture of gaming features and community driven features in the software. I think as a gaming platform, ioquake3 wouldn’t need to expand into that world so much, but for the developers working on building interactive systems with less of an FPS gaming perspective

For reference, here’s Julian Oliver’s site

Do you have anything further to add for all the readers of ioquake3.org?

For the developers out there I’d just say keep up the great work. It’s really encouraging to see all the great projects people are putting out there on their own time for the community to enjoy.

Ok lastly, Tell me – What kind of music do you listen to?

Hah, most of the time, I can be found listening to a mix of Fugazi, Radiohead, Beatles and a mashup of 20th century electronic and acoustic contemporary music like the works of Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti. I like it all, mixed up, just to keep things interesting

A video of the performance:

You can find more about q3osc and Rob here

From the Forum post:

q3osc is my updated version of Julian Oliver’s older q3apd mod which streamed user data from quake3 to the Pure Data (PD) audio processing language. I’ve built a similar project from a clean ioquake3 codebase and included a complete oscpack c++ lib to properly output not only user position data over osc but also individual projectiles, like plasma ball and BFG balls. The short of it is that that output can be used in a music software environment like PD, Max/MSP, Supercollider or ChucK to build interactive musical environments.

What does this mean? Means you can make music by playing the game! Some video demo’s included after the fold.

Check out the CCRMA wiki with complete specs and full information about it.

Also:

If any mappers out there would like to build some environments which could be used for musical performance, please let me know. My mapping chops aren’t exactly stellar.

So all you mappers get to work making some awesome maps for a really cool project!

Go get it!